Review: Louise Young: Feral

“I promise I'm not exaggerating things for comic effect,” laughs Louise Young, towards the end of this increasingly eventful hour. “If anything I'm playing them down.”

Young’s debut is a bit of a trojan horse, rolling in with a bunch of relatable but not particularly clever club stuff, then throwing open the doors and letting great hordes of gobsmacking material flood out. It is quite the life she led, having left her native north east for north east London, and things hardly calmed down further south, from doing a runner while being sectioned to an epiphany in a police station. 

The show’s big turning point is a ‘stop being crazy’ class she was sent on, for an afternoon, which was hopelessly optimistic. But then she squeezes a lot into this hour too, particularly the second half; her Turkish heritage, the fear of coming out onstage, and that rich history of fraternising with wrong-uns, doing speed at work and being generally – her word – feral. Everything in excess. Nothing in moderation.

In fact, you can’t help wondering if this gleefully dynamic comic has emptied out the envelope a bit early here, but there’s clearly a wealth of backstory still to come, and a unique perspective on the surrounding issues, from mental health funding to multicultural family matters. She even leaves a cliffhanger to whet appetites for the next show; something about being chased through a field by a helicopter. That should definitely do it.